


Miscellaneous Dublin Murder Squad Story Ideas

by Ashling



Category: Dublin Murder Squad Series - Tana French, Dublin Murders (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/F, Gen, Hijinks & Shenanigans, I Enjoyed Writing These, hasn't been beta read and won't be beta read BUT, it is stuffed with Love so you know what it is what it is
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-21
Updated: 2020-06-17
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:41:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23237878
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ashling/pseuds/Ashling
Summary: Sometimes, I get the idea for a DMS story, but I don't wanna spend a whole week pounding it out and then another week making sure it's good. It's not close enough to canon, or it's too wacky or too fluffy or not in-character enough. But! I still want to tell somebody all about it, 'cause I think it's fun.Let's pretend that you and I are casual Dublin Murder Squad friends, and let me tell you about, say, the time Holly got a girlfriend, or the time all the detectives wound up at Frank's house, or the time Stephen almost died.Okay, they're not all hijinks and found family. Some of them are sad. But at least I heartily enjoyed making them all.
Relationships: Holly Mackey & The Murder Squad
Comments: 6
Kudos: 3





	1. Holly Mackey & The Detectives, two stories: found family, gays, unintentionally coordinated panic attacks, passive aggressive eating

I want Cassie and Antoinette to be like momming the SHIT out of Holly while all three of them are on the run from the police and from criminals. Cassie and Antoinette are both only kids from tiny families with like no significant cousins so like, they'd not be very good at it! but boy they'd give it a hard shot.

basically, somebody poisoned Frank and tried to kidnap Holly, but they fucked up and Holly got away and so they made it look like Holly poisoned her dad. And Holly goes to Stephen's place, cause he's the only one she trusts, but Stephen is out and Antoinette is sleeping on the couch because her place is getting fumigated. Antoinette figures out right quick that Holly didn't try to kill her dad so they go on the run.

Cassie is part of the team hunting them down, but then she figures out from the inside that there's like a mole or something or basically that Holly didn't do it so when they're about to be captured she fucks it all up for the police and joins them on the run.

and then at some point Frank wakes up like "holy shit what the fuck is going on" and Olivia's like "babe someone's trying to kill you and frame our daughter but I have like all this blackmail material on these various police I just wasn't quite sure if now was the moment to use it???" and Frank's like holy SHIT and there's like this wild fucking crime scene and they're doing their forensic detective shit

and the report is just: y'all.........these men tried to get at Holly RIP in pieces there's a lotta blood and Frank's like "if I wasn't so fucking ready to have a heart attack from stress I would be loving this"

Stephen, who has always been scared of Frank and who loves Nice things, and Frank, who despises that about Stephen and still thinks of Stephen as his junior......the two of them vibing at the Exact Same Frequency of "oh my god the girls have gone feral while I was away!!!! are they hydrated???? I hope they're staying hydrated!!!!!!"

Frank hates it of course. he can't put it into words but if he could: "bitch you dont know how i feel. you can't know what im feeling. these are MY feelings. this is MY panic attack! GET YOUR OWN!"

and eventually it all gets straightened out and Holly gets to come home and the chaos goblins (Cassie, Frank) are cackling while Antoinette and Holly are fast asleep and the Only Reasonable Ones (Stephen, Olivia, and Sam) are drinking copiously together and going "jaysus fuck its hard work keeping them alive"

some time later, Holly gets into a serious relationship and is like "alright get it out of your system dad consider this the official family meeting of the boyfriend" and so Olivia invites her parents like a Normal Person and Frank invites like a bunch of people from work (perhaps this is post-the poisoning story?) so it's like Cassie and Sam and Stephen and Antoinette and they all have wildly different approaches. 

Cassie's like I'mma psycoanalyze the shit out of this kid, as long as the hors d'oeuvres are good im golden (and of course food's good, Olivia got it catered sflkjsdlkjadsjf she doesn't have time to do a ton of cooking).

Stephen is like "my eternal instinct to make people like me is warring with the fact that I'm starting to think Holly Mackey is a little bit cursed and I would love to nip in the bud any kind of Major Crime that is springing up near her now"

Antoinnette is like "I don't know this kid but I will kill him for sure"

and Sam is like "poor fella is probably scared shitless sure and why can't we all get along"

Frank: "Cassie, Antoinette, great energy--Steve, you're getting there--Sam, I need like 500% more from you, you're giving me next to nothing." Olivia's genteel parents are like "oh what an interesting dinner party this is!" whilst everyone except Sam ignores them. Even Olivia is way too focused on this guy because due to certain context clues she is pretty sure her daughter is not a virgin anymore) and she has no blackmail materials on anyone yet and she's feeling vulnerable about the whole situation

So then Holly shows up with a girlfriend and it throws like everybody off because they're like "oh.........I'm supposed to be a real dickbag but that's a girl.........now if I'm a dickbag she'll think I'm a homophobe :("

Frank is struggling particularly hard

Antoinette is the only one who is completely unfazed and continues to be an asshole with ease and grace because she's secure in her own bisexuality (which nobody but Stephen knows about, because fuck everyone who's not Stephen, if you ask her)

Cassie says very little and eats a lot she's just analyzing the heck out of this girl

this girl is tall, I think that's important to state upfront

Sam is slightly off kilter because this is a new social situation but when he senses that Olivia's parents are more off kilter than he is he immediately feels comfortable again cause being the more steady and calm person in the room is his sense of normal

Frank is still freaking out so he's joining Cassie in her eating-and-watching thing but unlike Cassie he doesn't have a huge metabolism--in fact he has a small one because he's trained his body to survive on bits of junk food and Chinese takeaway alone while he's deadly focused on undercover operations--so he doesn't look half as normal as she does

Stephen and Olivia are being really nice and normal on the outside and Scheming on the inside

and right before it all ends, Frank (who is dimly aware this was not the best little soiree he could've put on) and Olivia (who is ACUTELY aware) pull themselves together and manage to say something genuinely very nice to the girl (I'm open to name suggestions) and they practically collapse with relief when the door closes

the VERY FIRST THING Holly says afteer the door closes: "I TOLD you my family's weird!"

Tall Girl: "I kinda liked it"

meanwhile Olivia's parents are staying over "for a nightcap" aka drinking and gossip with their daughter, and Frank needs to debrief too, so he hauls everyone to a pub and they are Seen by some just-out-of-Templemore floater huddled around a table. not even drinking yet, arguing a lot, and analyzing a lot. and the floater goes and tells all his friends that Frank Mackey & Co are working on a secret operation and O'Kelly hauls in Frank all ready to have a big fight over whatever the bullshit it is and then when Frank tries to explain O'Kelly doesn't believe it and it becomes a Whole Thing


	2. fishhook (the season 2 that will never happen)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> a complementary and casual plot map for a Dublin Murders season 2 of TV that will never happen  
> you can read a partial script of the hypothetical first episode [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/23844685?view_full_work=true)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> shoutout cosette_f for asking "what happens to Sam?" <3
> 
> it's a mess and it was supposed to be ~500 words long. so. I don't know what happened but I ain't sorry

Before season two of Dublin Murders starts, a lot has happened. (Some of this is stolen from Tana French, and some of it is stolen from Love/Hate, but most of it is made up.) Cassie has been bumped to Domestic Violence and is still dating Sam. She hopes to return to Murder someday, although so far she's made very little headway; it's difficult to collect departmental goodwill doing DV cases. Sam, for his part, has transferred to Serious and Organized Crime in order to leave a path for Cassie to return to Murder without O'Kelly using their relationship-based conflict of interest as an excuse to not take Cassie back. Moynihan, the head of S&O, has pancreatic cancer and is widely expected to step down soon; Sam, with two years at S&O, a sterling record from Murder, and political connections/protections, is likely to replace him. Ever since the overlapping catastrophes of Operation Vestal and Operation Mirror, Sam and Cassie have been more or less together, although perhaps less comfortably than before. 

Their equilibrium is disturbed by an operation gone wrong in an entirely different department. Joe "Fleas" Leahy, a quick-witted detective with a long track record of success in Undercover, infiltrates a drug-smuggling organization, the Coonan family, in a mission overseen by Frank Mackey. Operation Fishhook a bit of a long shot, but then, things with Frank always are. For a couple of months, Fleas seems to be doing just fine, and then, on one sunless pedestrian day, he simply disappears. His phone is never found. His body is never found. There isn’t enough evidence to implicate the suspected organization, not enough for the cops to go in and search every Coonan property top to bottom for a corpse. 

To understand what happens next, you need to know how rare this is in modern Ireland; since 1922, there’s only been 88 garda total which are officially recorded as having been killed on duty, and of those, there’s quite a few who got killed accidentally, and some who get killed by political violence. The number of undercovers that get killed, while not public knowledge, is actually very small. Frank has seen it happen. There have been undercovers killed while he’s in the department. But this is the first time one of his own has died, and he can’t even get the body.

He fakes the evidence.

No, it’s not just that. He fakes the evidence and fails. Undercovers get a lot of leeway—too much—and Frank’s earned himself a lot of leeway over the years, through sheer success. But Operation Fishhook is the case on which he spends every last penny of his remaining social capital. All his favors. And he sees the line, clear-eyed, and steps across it. As a result, all Coonan properties are raided, the department is hit with a huge lawsuit, Frank is suspended in disgrace, and that all would be fine with him, except he didn’t find the body. So it’s not fucking fine.

When on suspension, he begs his ex-wife for some vacation time with their daughter, Holly, and after much cajoling, she gives in. And it’s a delight. Holly’s at that age where she can talk about anything for hours if she feels like it, and Holly’s the only person that Frank doesn’t mind listening to endlessly. She’s still very into horses, which he thought she would’ve outgrown. He takes her to the country, takes lots of pictures of her on ponies, refuses several times all offer that he himself might get on a horse. Takes her back to the city, pizza and museums. Doesn’t care for museums, but doesn’t mind them when he’s with her. More pizza.

It’s up to who you ask what happens next. To his dying day, Frank swears that it was an accident. The judge says otherwise. The judge says, if you involve your child in a case and put her in harm’s way, you’re lucky to get a visitation with her twice a month. The judge says, you’re lucky it was you got shot and not Holly. The judge does not say, you’re a fucking disgrace. He looks it, though.

More suspension. A strong possibility of demotion. A strong possibility of being fired. For a week or so, Frank’s past caring about that. His wounded hand gets infected and he gets a fever and goes to hospital but he doesn’t start healing right until he sees Holly again. She’s not mad at him, but she is cautious. She never used to be cautious with him before. It breaks his heart.

Meanwhile, Stephen Moran has earned himself a certain amount of goodwill from the higher-ups and the reputation of a snitch, for having provided IA with information about Frank’s tactics. To be fair, this level of betrayal is something that Frank taught him, a while ago. Scorcher Kennedy retired pretty young; he does private security now. What goes around comes around. Maybe that’s why he seems unbothered by the rancor of other detectives, some say, maybe it’s because Mackey deserved it. Others say, Moran was a brownnoser from the start, ready to clamber over anybody else in the climb to the top, never made friends, never gave a damn about anybody but himself, that’s why he doesn’t care what happens to Mackey.

They’re all wrong, in every possible way. Stephen does care about what happens to Frank. He is bothered by the new-minted hatred of the detectives around him. He doesn’t think Frank deserved the level of shit that rained down on him, but then, he informed on Frank before the catastrophe with Holly; he thought Frank would survive the betrayal easily. Lastly, it’s not true that Stephen never made friends and never gave a damn about anybody but himself. He does have a friend. That’s why he betrayed Frank in the first place.

Stephen worked with Antoinette Conway only on one case, when they were both on Missing Persons, but one case was enough. He found himself acting differently around her; he took risks he wouldn’t otherwise take, he’d get angry when usually he wouldn’t mind, he stood up when usually he’d keep his head down. There was something about her. She got under his skin, and he never forgot it. 

When Antonette asks him to turn in Frank Mackey, she doesn’t say why. She doesn’t at any time speak with him about Fleas, she doesn’t bring up her theory that Mackey was in over his head and that another lead detective would have a much better chance of getting the body back, and she definitely doesn’t mention that Fleas had belonged to her as much as any active Undercover can belong to anybody else. All she does is point out the benefits Stephen could get, the possibility of promotion given a recent anti-corruption drive by the brass. And Stephen does it because she asks him to; because, at the end of the day, he’s damn sure that Antoinette Conway doesn’t ask favors over something petty. He prefers to stay neutral, but he’s got to pick sides, he would much rather be on her side than anybody else’s. 

Nobody truly gets what they want. Fleas’ body is still missing. Stephen ascends to Serious and Organized Crime, where he’s helped a bit by Sam but shunned by everybody else. Antoinette spends so much time at the shooting range that the man who runs it starts helping her train for the annual departmental championship. Frank is reprimanded and told that he won’t be fired at the end of his suspension; it is clear that nobody believes his story, but they’re keeping him around because he still might be more useful to them and they don’t want to deal with him as a loose cannon. And then Cassie gets a text from a floater named Helen McInerney.

Rob Reilly doesn't have friends these days, but Helen comes close. He is tall and gloomy and English—English in the voice, anyways—and appears to stalk through life wishing it was over already. Helen, on the other hand, is tiny and fiery and from Cork. She appears to have never lost the childlike talent of actually enjoying waking up in the mornings. The only thing that Rob and Helen have in common, aside from the job, is that they’re both former addicts. For Helen, it was alcohol; for Rob, it wasn’t. But after one stakeout late at night when boredom turned into a sleep-deprived and reckless bit of truth-telling, they’ve always had an eye out for each other, even if they still don’t like each other very much.

So when Helen catches Rob packing up his locker, she cajoles him into telling her why, and when she hears the sort of operation he’s signed up for, alarms go off in her head. She’s not able to talk him out of it, so she contacts the one person that she thinks can get the job done: Cassie.

Cassie knows better than to go to Rob. It was bad enough, the two times she’s run into him, once on the street and once at a burger joint they both used to like. The magnetism there is still so intense, so unfaded, it scares her. So she goes to Frank instead, armed with just about every weapon she can find to turn against him. A wounded animal is dangerous, and Frank’s still bleeding.

The ensuing fight is spectacular; for half the battle, they’re both playing at casual catch-up, and Rob’s name isn’t spoken. Once the cause for Cassie coming has become clear, though, the fighting gets brutal. Cassie makes it clear that if Frank persists in trying to use Rob in his undercover operation, she can go after Frank in every aspect of his life—including another of his custody hearings concerning Holly. She can testify to things Frank has done; she can make a difference in the outcome.

Frank says fine, he’ll leave Rob alone if Cassie comes to take his place. She’d be a million miles better than Rob, but it’s still a fucked-up proposition and they both know it. She’ll throw herself on the fire before she lets Rob burn, and they both know that too.

When Cassie emerges from Frank’s apartment, knowing that she’ll be going undercover with Frank as her handler, knowing she and Frank will always have a thread of enmity between them now, she finds that her phone is blowing up with texts and missed calls. 

Earlier that night, Sam and Stephen were tailing a car driven by Lucas Johnstone (and yes, he is the cousin of jailed drug lord Vincent Johnstone, why do you ask?) They were tailing Lucas because the Johnstone family and the Coonan family are in the midst of negotiating a deal, and Moynihan’s theory is that Lucas may have turned against his own side; if that’s so, a peaceful deal isn’t happening and a bloody war is on the horizon. So it’s good to keep updated on what Lucas is doing.

What appears to happen is this: a big truck T-bones Lucas Johnstone’s car, killing him instantly and causing Stephen and Sam to crash. Stephen is hurt a little; oddly enough, his wounded hand is the right hand, same as Frank’s. But Sam is hurt badly, caught the worst of the crash with broken bones and some injured organs. There’s surgery and there’s a waiting room and O’Kelly more or less gives Cassie a week of sick leave even though she’s perfectly healthy. Sam doesn’t die, but it’s a close call. There’s no way he’ll leave the hospital anytime soon, much less get back to work. 

Cassie always knew that he was well-liked, and always knew there was much in him to love, but even she is surprised by the number of flowers, cards, text messages, offers of soup, and visitors that he gets. And then there’s a text from Rob, which surprises her most of all. He has something to offer her, too, something that he thinks will help Sam. Cassie is released from her undercover mission. Fishhook Two is still going to happen, but Rob’s taking the lead role now, and he wants her to know that he’ll do his best with it, for her sake. He’ll stay clean. He’ll stay safe. He’s making promises he can’t keep, and it’s no comfort, but he says it anyway.

And then he goes. 

This time, Frank has a lot less leeway; he’s working closely with S&O, although obviously Moynihan knows better than to let Stephen anywhere near Frank. You can practically smell the history coming off them when they’re in the same damn room. Stephen is still working the Johnstone angle of the case, although he’s doing it with a new partner, Terry. Frank’s operation, working the Coonan angle, is liaising mostly with his old friend Ciaran Madden, and Madden’s new partner, the third woman to make S&O, a new recruit brought in to fill in for Sam: Antoinette Conway. She’s still angry enough over the loss of Fleas that she could fistfight Frank and win, but she knows better than to let that show. 

It’s not clear who wanted Lucas Johnstone dead. Was it his own family? Was it the Coonans? Or was it somebody else? What is clear, after some very heated discussions with Cooper the pathologist, is that Lucas Johnstone isn’t dead. Or, rather, the man killed in the same car crash that injured Sam and Steve is not Lucas Johnstone. Wrong DNA, wrong fit for dental records, and a lack of certain tattoos. Lucas Johnstone is still out there somewhere.

Rob makes finding him a priority, and for a little while, Rob seems to be doing okay. It’s about a week and a half before he stops making the proper daily check-ins. Just like Fleas, he seems to have disappeared right off the map, his GPS tracker destroyed, phone ditto.

This time, they can’t go in and raid every property, and they sure as hell can’t fake evidence; every tactic that Frank already tried with Fleas is not available for second use with Rob. The court cases regarding the last time he did all that is still ongoing, but it’s looking like it will cost the department a horrifyingly large amount of money. And also, Moynihan’s on this case, and he’s got more ethical qualms than Frank does. 

Rob wakes up in a farmhouse basement, tied to a chair. He has company. There’s more than one chair. Seated across from Rob, legs tied to an old iron bed frame, scribbling on his own arm with a kid’s grape-scented Magic Marker and humming a bit of Beyoncé, is Fleas.

Rob makes a half-strangled noise, and Fleas looks up with a ready grin. Oh, good, you’re awake, he says. About time. Ready for a jailbreak?

Patience is one of the most important qualities to have in an undercover detective, and Fleas has it in spades. Turns out he’s spent the past few months in this basement because the Coonan patriarch ordered his son to kill Fleas, and the son just couldn’t do it, so he made Fleas captive instead. They escape together, only to find that the son is just driving into the driveway. There's no time to get back in the basement and pretend everything is normal, and there's no vehicle for Fleas to hotwire, so they make a run for it into the countryside. Pretty soon, the whole Coonan family + associates + Lucas Johnstone are trying to hunt them down. Johnstone is the one who finds them first, and he doesn't turn them in. Instead, he spins them a pretty story about how his family are legitimate but they're being blackmailed by the Coonans into consolidation with their criminal empire—and then he lets them go.

The arrests are immediate. Antoinette and Stephen are among those who get every last Coonan & associate from their hiding holes, and there's some bruises, one S&O detective with a broken arm, and a good deal of shouting but no casualties. Frank misses one of his two monthly visits with his daughter to make sure the arrests go down, and then they're all stuck. They don't have enough against the Johnstone family to make any charges stick, and as pleased as they all are about getting the Coonans, something about Lucas using them—using Rob and Fleas—to knock out a competitor in the drug business, pisses everybody off. 

Rob goes to visit Cassie in the hospital, but she's asleep in a chair beside the bed. Sam, however, is awake. They talk. There's so little rancor in Sam, and that's not just the effect of time and distance and painkillers. The only way you can truly earn Sam's enmity is by hurting Cassie, and Sam has seen over the past weeks how much Cassie has suffered over not going in Rob's place. So it's a complicated thing, he sees that now. Rob's half-ally, half-enemy, and probably always will be. But he's glad Rob's alive, and Rob's surprised to find that he too is glad that Sam is alive, and that they've settled into—something. Speaking terms. The nurse comes in with Jello and Cassie wakes up, stares. The most fraught silence of the decade. When the nurse leaves, Sam says, "It's all right." And it very nearly is. Cassie is so warm in Rob's arms and her happiness is so real, tears and all. 

Back at S&O, Fleas is more angry than anyone else at being used. All that time locked up, all that patience, everything it took to survive, and he still didn't come out on top. And the outside world is so strange, and too much, and Antoinette can't or won't touch him, he can't or won't touch her. It was supposed to be victory burgers but even burgers don't taste like they used to. They are both of them cagey as hell. Stephen, meantime, plays Nice Boy Next Door with Lucas Johnstone till Lucas is fully convinced of Stephen's harmlessness and goes in to give a statement about the whole thing, thinking this will be another nail in the Coonans' coffin. And then it's Stephen and Antoinette in one interrogation room, while Fleas has an epiphany about which Johnstone had orchestrated Lucas's fake murder. He calls up Rob, and the two of them take on the Coonan son that had them locked up. Two interrogations, long hours, and the rhythms of each building, each new small insight or snatch of information passed between Fleas and Antoinette until all four of them seem to be working as smoothly together as pistons in a car. 

At some point, Cassie slips into the room behind the two-way glass. Frank is there, and they sit there in a silence that is not reconciliation, but too tired for enmity. They watch as Stephen and Antoinette trap Johnstone in a corner; they watch as Fleas and Rob land the killing blow on the case. The Coonan son and Lucas had been working together all along. Antoinette and Stephen go off to a pub, too wired for sleep; Fleas is invited, but he can't stand the thought of the crowd, so he says he needs to do some more interviews with IA about his time in captivity, he'll catch them later. He watches them go. Frank watches him watching them go, and watches, also, Cassie driving off with Rob in the shotgun seat. He hopes they mend, at least a little. He hopes some good can come of this, for somebody. He feels hollow. Olivia, his ex-wife, has left him a very simple message on his voicemail. "It wasn't worth it," she says. "Whatever it was, it wasn't worth it." And Frank knows that she's right: there is such a thing as too far, such a thing as lost. And he may be lost for good.

He lights a cigarette, and Fleas hangs around to smoke too. They know each other well, are friends in their own way, familiar and as comfortable as any two Undercover detectives, each lone wolves in their own right, can be. Frank opens his mouth to say something, thinks better of it for once in his life, and when Fleas tells him to go on, he just shakes his head and says he's fucked up his own life enough, he has no call giving anyone else advice. Advice about what, Fleas wants to know. Well, as it turns out, advice about where to sleep tonight, since Fleas's apartment was long vacated, his things donated to charity, nearly all of his small life outside of work wiped away clean. Advice about where to sleep tonight, and tucked into that, perhaps some implications about with whom he should be sleeping. Not that it's Frank's business, as he himself openly admits. But then, as Fleas says, when has that ever stopped him?

Yeah, Frank says, and shrugs it off, and they both go on to smoke some more and avoid their lives some more. But it is possible that this conversation—not anything Frank said, but the wounded look in his eyes at the slightest mention of Holly—is what has Fleas letting himself into Antoinette's apartment much later that night, when she's drunkenly, solidly asleep. He falls asleep in an armchair since she hasn't even got a sofa. It's much like Rob, sleeping in another chair in a waiting room in the hospital where Sam and Cassie are. It's what could be called a start. God knows where it all will end; I certainly don't. But I hope it ends somewhere sweeter than where it all began.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm open to prompts, and also, if you're down to have me tell you random stories like these, lmk. I'm on discord and tumblr


End file.
